Posted on 05/19/2009 11:25:10 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be tredging through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today, the same ones that wouldn't be possible on a CPU alone. Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that where once handled by the CPU.
It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don't want to miss!
A virgin in the 3D graphics arena, S3 in 1995 thrust itself into this new territory with its ViRGE graphics series. Playing on the hype surrounding virtual reality a decade and a half ago, ViRGE stood for Virtual Reality Graphics Engine and was one of the first 3D GPUs to take aim at the mainstream consumer. While nothing compared to today’s offerings, early 64-bit ViRGE cards came with up to 4MB of onboard memory, and core and memory clockspeeds of up to 66MHz. It also supported such features as Bilinear and Trilinear texture filtering, MIP mapping, alpha blending, video texturing mapping, Z-buffering, and other 3D texture mapping goodies.
Ironically, those same ‘cutting edge’ features took a toll on the ViRGE silicon resulting in underwhelming 3D performance. In some cases, performance was so bad that users could obtain better results with the CPU, causing the ViRGE to be unaffectionate dubbed the first 3D decelerator. Ouch.
Fun Fact: Just how far has graphic cards come in the past 15 years? Enough so that we've seen the S3 ViRGE selling for as little as $0.45 in the second-hand market.
That makes sense.
That’s actually a LOT slower than my 2.8GHz Athlon X2. I also have 4GB of Infineon in it. DDR400, but it’s still solid.
It's a conglomerate machine. Almost like an asteroidal accretion body.
I hate throwing things out. I’ll run the wheels off it before tossing it.
if you want to run OpenGL2.+ or GLSL shader stuff or GPGPU or PhysX projects Nv and AMD leave no choice.
If it’ll run Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3, it’ll keep me busy until I can rebuild my system and play Diablo 3.
At Christmas, I bought a 4670 for about $50. I thought that was a pretty spectacular deal.
Pity I threw out all my Accelgraphics boards.
Anyone remember the flaming A?
I entered the entire Star Trek BASIC game using of those. Not a bad terminal. Even learned FORTRAN and COBOL and Assembly on it.
Hell. I’ve got one I’ll GIVE away!
Heck, I still have a 16 meg AGP Voodoo Banshee sitting around, that still works, if you want to run Quake 1 or World Circuit . . . .
Company I worked for in the 90’s got a PCMag Editor’s choice award by being the only computer in the line that included the Diamond S3 cards. Everyone else was still using plain video graphics cards.
We had a lot of customers calling and claiming we cheated the benchmark system by putting in a better video card. Now 15 years later those same customers demand it.
What’s the socket and motherboard on that...?
Had one of those too. Obviously I didn’t have a DEC in my basement. My CoCo only had 16K, a 300bd modem, cassette drive and a VideoTex cartridge.
I remember that BASIC game. A friend and I entered it in on his dad’s PC. Man that was a lot of work.
It would look something like this:
My first was a Diamond Viper VLB with 4 MB!! The computer itself only had 8 MB. DOS performance sucked, but Windows-based games rocked.
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